Hi my name is AdamI have an Arduino uno That i got a wave shield for a while ago. Opened it today and found that the thumb wheel was broken. Started looking on line for return policies and stumbled upon an mp3 shield. I want to add background sound too a model train layout. I will hide a couple speakers within the layout somewhere and just play back ambient sounds from a random town , car horns, kids playing etc......Can someone tell me which shield would be good for this? Between the mp3 and the wave shield, is there one that produces better sound or is easier to work with. Thanks for any input on thisAdam

The Wave shield is one of our oldest kits and is a bit limited in what it can do. The Music Maker shield can play a much wider variety of file types. And it is stereo - unlike the mono-only wave shield.

Other options for sound-effects are the Fx boards: https://www.adafruit.com/?q=fxThese use a similar chip to the Music Maker. But they have digital 'trigger' pins that can be used to play different sound files on queue. For example, an occupancy detector circuit near a crossing gate could be used to trigger the sound for the crossing gate bells.

One more question about the sound for my layout. The FX board looks pretty cut and dry and seems like the fastest way to get sound on my train layout. The capacity of the chip seems a bit limited though. If I understand correctly I can have about an hour of compressed non stereo sound on the chip.Is this too optimistic or is that possible? Also, it looks like if I want to use the FX board for something like a grade crossing on the layout, it can do the sound of the bells, but it doesn't look like there are any pins to do the alternating lights for the grade crossing. Can I power up LEDs with this board or do I need to use a separate board too do that. Thanks again for any input into this.Adam

The FX boards are ideal for relatively short sound clips triggered by activity on your layout. With compressed Ogg Vorbis, you can usually squeeze about an hour total onto a 16 meg Fx board. For a longer running continuous background soundtrack, the Music Maker shield has an SD card slot, so you can store gigabytes worth of of sound files.

Th FX is for sound only. It does not ave any GPIO pins. For additional effects such as flashing lights, you would need a microcontroller board of some sort. Blinking lights are pretty simple. There are a few different approaches depending on how many you want to have.